Well, I got an account (or three) when I heard that 1and1.com was offering free accounts in one of my game trader mag's so I figured I had nothing to loose. My experiance has been all but good, in fact I reccommend that NO ONE EVER use them for ANYTHING. Here I will review their services.
1. Domain Registration.
Well, at first I thought "Hey $6 domains, lets try it out, that beats anything I've ever seen!"... You definately get what you pay for... I registered my domain on January 10th, with their services you're REQUIRED to use their NS servers for your domains, and they had no where to update ns entries, upon contacting a tech I heard "we will soon be releasing the capability" and I asked them to update them for me and never got a response. Everyone here should know me by now, when I don't get a response I ask again and again until it's answered or I'm yelled at; all they did was ignore me.
Transferring my domain out of there definately sucked, you have to wait 60 days to transfer new domains from any registrar, so I had an inactive domain for 2 months that I could do nothing with, it halted the production on one of my projects by 2 months and costed me about $300 thus far.
2. Email
Well, you can't use your own username, you have some randomly generated character usernames which are definately easy to misplace. You can use 10 email addresses, no more. You also must use their pop/smtp servers, they don't set your domains up to look like their yours, definatly a down with customers who use your email services. My mail took about 8 hours to deliver (tried about 5 times), which is worse than even hotmail and AOL, one would think that someone attempting to be this professional would at least humor me with a good email service, well I was wrong again.
3. Web Hosting
Well, if you do your own DNS maintanance you can forget it, with this service they require you to use their DNS servers, so you can't forward your DNS servers like every good webmaster would not want to do. I use my own NS servers so that I don't have to worry about subdomain limits, and so I can maintin my IRC server addreses without having to mess with a server config every other day (which most people who have their sites hosted somewhere that they don't work they won't be able to and will drive their host mad).
Their webhosting interface sucks, you can add a domain quite easily but trying to map what webspace you want to use with what domain is the largest PITA i've ever seen, especially since the application they use to show what directories you have in your webspace doesn't show all the directories...
All I wanted to do was forward mydomain.com to /space/mydomain and forward myotherdomain to /space/myotherdomain but their directory utility wouldn't even show /space... Evidently for it to show the directories you have to create them through the web interface and not FTP...
Speaking of FTP, it uses the same type of usernames as i mentioned above, and it'll time you out after 1 minute of inactivity... So if you're sidetracked you have to reconnect and when theres 60 other users on the same server as you, you're not getting on.
4. Tech Support
Should I say lack there of? I tried a few times to discuss with them about my needs of needing to host my own dns as I need to use subdomains for my clients and my IRC servers and since their systems don't allow me access for either of these it's an impossiblity to use them to host my DNS, eventhough my A record is forwarding to their site...
All in all, I'd rather use tripod for my webhosting than 1and1, at least their setup works. I give 1and1 a rating of 1 out of 5.
